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Mothers or Marketers: Who Will Raise the Children?

All of a sudden, it begins to make sense. The years of prodding and whining, all those temper tantrums of "please, mama, buy me this!" It seems that every day it gets harder to teach our children patience and self-discipline. We worry about the coarsening of our children's manners. We may think that it is an isolated thing, that it happens only in our family, or that it's a personal failure. But now it turns out that what is happening to our children is in no small part the result of well-researched, well-funded marketing campaigns designed for the world's leading advertisers by some of the world's most creative minds.

For most of the history of advertising, advertisers believed that if they wanted to sell their products to children, they had to go through their mothers. Those days are gone.

Advertisers and marketers are today aggressively bypassing mothers to get directly at children. And therein lies a profound threat to mothers and to the vocation of mothering.

According to Kidscreen, a marketing industry newsletter, "There have never been more ways in the culture to support marketing toward kids, and there have never been more outlets to study how to speak to them. That makes the competition for kids' attention significantly greater, forcing advertisers to work harder to get inside kids' heads." And working harder they are.

In the heated competition for what marketing people call "share of mind," advertisers are aggressively going after babies and toddlers, age groups that until recently have been considered off limits. They are placing advertising in nearly every available location, taking up more and more of our children's physical and psychic space. They are using the potent tools of the behavioral sciences and a range of powerful new media technologies to develop and deliver marketing campaigns to reach our children nearly everywhere they go.

The problem is that in their zeal to sell their products and services, advertisers and marketers are clearly treading on mothers' territory. They are even speaking the language of mothering. In the words of James U. Mc Neal, a leading authority on the children's market, advertisers and marketers see children as "consumer cadets," who "begin their consumership early in life," with the "consumer embryo" beginning "to develop in the first year of existence." Advertisers, according to McNeal, seek to maintain "a permanent relationship with children."

In the rush to sell, too many advertisers are not watching what they do and what they say in front of our children, and they are, intentionally or not, teaching our children a set of values that are at odds with the values that most mothers try to teach their children. So much of marketing sells the message that life is about selfishness, instant gratification, and materialism. We try to teach our children to care about others, to discipline themselves, and that there is more to life than material things.

In this competition between marketers and mothers, mothers are clearly losing. It is time for mothers to respond. It is time for mothers to say unequivocally that they will not continue to let marketers overstep their bounds. That is why many CFI members have joined over 120 concerned mothers, caregivers, scholars, and advocates as a signatory to Watch Out For Children: A Mothers' Statement To Advertisers, an eye-opening new report from the Mothers' Council of the Institute for American Values in New York City.

Watch Out For Children shows how those who advertise products and services and sponsor media programs are harming children. It calls upon advertisers to stop and urges them to endorse a Mothers' Code for advertisers to safeguard our children, AND makes numerous other concrete recommendations to protect children.

Watch Out For Children acknowledges that advertisers are not solely responsible for the harm to children. It makes clear that in order to protect children, mothers and other caregivers must make concrete changes in their own lives even as they seek to hold advertisers accountable.

Watch Out For Children is an important and timely reminder of common sense notions: all adults from parents to business leaders must watch what they do and say in front of children, all adults must watch out for children.

There is a dangerous imbalance in our culture between the values of commerce and the values necessary to raise good children. It is time for all of us to work together to redress that imbalance for the benefit of our children.

What You Can Do:

Become a signatory to the Mother's Council appeal to advertisers, Watch Out for Children. Visit the Watch Out for Children Web site at www.rebelmothers.org to read the entire text of the statement, to view the list of signatories and read responses from advertisers. Visitors to this site will be invited to join the list of signatories. To receive a printed copy of Watch Out for Children, call or e-mail the Institute for American Values by phone (212) 246-3942 or e-mail info@americanvalues.org.